💰 Ability to charge third parties for a white-labeled application

[Johg_Ananda]

This is a follow up to the Year of the Maker webinar where this was the #1 suggested idea that makers would like to see in 2020.

[Johg_Ananda]

Many of us will create incredible apps/docs that the market would gladly pay for. There needs to be a way to take an existing Coda doc and provide a permission and payment scheme to allow third party users to enroll and begin using immediately ala iTunes or Shopify app store.

To tackle this and making it as ‘Coda-y’ as possible, perhaps there could be a special section type that allowed people to enroll in the app and take payment. This section could be embedded in an app/doc author’s elsewhere-hosted site that ‘sells’ and markets the app. Prospective users could view the sales page and then use the embedded section to do the enrollment and payment securely.

Once they sign in, they would be taken to a coda canvas, sans some of the chrome and branding. The doc author can lock/hide the sections that don’t pertain to the user. It would be nice to have a walkthrough/tour lesson. This would instruct users on how to set up the app and use it.

Payment can be simple - at first charge $/mo for an instance of the new app, then add the ability to charge per user and you can expand the pricing schemas available as we go.

The ability to provide support to the customer comes up and could be addressed by allowing an author to encode their own intercom account credentials and take requests from the app.

Would love to hear other people thoughts on how to make this simple and doable!

[ABp]

Hey, I just watched the webinar

https://community.coda.io/t/save-the-date-a-chat-with-coda-ceo-shishir/12879

on Youtube, and @shishir I believe asked for some feedback on this whole question and how the community might see it. I wanted to add my 2 cents as a big fan of Coda, evangelist, but most likely a consumer of these services, and not Maker earning income from them.

I wrote a bit about that in this post earlier:

The shortest Coda sales pitch for Excel users

Hey @Paul_Danyliuk, I just couldn’t resist responding to this one. I am I continuing to ramp up my efforts to solve what I’m trying to do in Coda - in a few instances with your help, many thanks - in the last two weeks. As a non-dev, but “somewhat technical” manager in a software company, and also the decider of my team about which solution we will use to manage our processes, something hit me recently that seems partially relevant to this thread, and I think very relevant to those coming ove…

And to expand, one thing that first comes to mind for me is to be very sure that the solution is such that the integrity of Coda is maintained with any initiative to “resell” docs or templates that are not officially “built by Coda.” My fascination with Coda is that I think it can actually do everything on my list of needs from a project/task management app, and just about all competitors fail in some way or another. But I’ve seen them often attempt to fill gaps with solutions like third party apps (Jira), integrated middleware at cost (Wrike), or mass amounts of integrations that replace a solution that could probably be built natively in the app.

I don’t really have an idea about how to go forward here, it’s challenging. But I agree wholeheartedly that there is a growing group of talented Makers that can really help non-technical types like myself accomplish amazing things with Coda. It would be great to figure out a way to make this happen while maintaining the utmost in quality standards we now expect of Coda, for a good reason! For sure I’d pay for such services, and I’m sure there is a mass market out there who would as well!

Cheers!